Once the study of history was thought to be hardly more than learning a catalogue of royal djmasties ; tihe names of famous generals and statesmen : of battles lost and won ; of court intrigues ; of the vicissitudes of kingdoms ; of the prowess of pioneers and adventurers ; of " hair-breadth 'scapes i' the imminent deadly breach ;" of the pride, pomp and circumstance of glorious war ! Such incidents have not lost, and never can lose, their interest. They are an integral part of the human document and must always be studied. "WThen draped with myth and legend they minister to " the vision and faculty divine " of the poet ; they visualize the possibilities of human courage ; stimulate the affections ; answer to the eternal cravings of the imagination. But they are only the phenomena of the real history of the race. Life is broader, larger, deeper, richer, fuller, than a mere transcript of happenings -- ex-

136 NEW YORK STATE HISTORICAL ASSOCIATION.

ternals, results -- important as they are. We must get at the causes, motives, inter-relations, the hidden causes from which events flow, before we can unravel the web in which they are woven, and thus interpret them. The core of history is the element which the Greeks called toanthropeion; called by a modern poet " the bases of life ;" called by us average folk, Human Nature. It is as constant a quality as anything can be in our moving life. We may not be able to agree with Middleton, who says in his life of Cicero, " Human nature has ever been the same in all ages and nations ;" but it is probably true that nothing has changed less in primal qualities than the bases of life. Empires have perished, civilizations vanished, governments have rotted, languages, territorial lines, seeming sit-fast institutions, have passed into nothingness ; but the human element has stood the sihock of ages.